The series follows the survivors of an interstellar space transport who end up crash-landing on a bizarre alien planet.
The series has examples of:
- Alien Blood: Surprisingly subverted. Despite being an alien planet and featuring some spectacularly Bizarre Alien Biology, its animals bleed red blood.
- Alien Sky: Vesta has two moons.
- Angrish: Kamen's first "dialogue" is a mixture of this, Laughing Mad, and sobbing after being trapped alone in his escape pod for weeks.
- Asteroid Miners: Kris's group is introduced drilling into the moon of Vesta. The prospect of obtaining far more valuable colony supplies from the Demeter convinces her to answer Azi's distress call.
- Assimilation Backfire: The Hollow tries to feed its black goo to the reassembled Levi, only to be hit with a psychic backlash that obliterates its massive form and reduces it to its original size.
- The Assimilator: The telekinetic creature that Kamen had encountered absorbs him into its innards at his request, yet keeping him alive by feeding him through some tube. It's shown to be influenced by his thoughts, chasing after Azi and Levi because the latter shares Fiona's voice.
- Bad Black Barf: The telepathic creatures hunt by feeding a black substance to other creatures, which brainwashes them into gathering food for them. They normally do this with small, amoeba-like creatures to get them to gather berries, but the Hollow hits the jackpot when it finds Kamen, who is able to kill much larger prey, allowing it to grow well beyond the size its kind normally do.
- Bad Boss: The company that owns the Demeter writes off the transport as soon as they learn it failed to arrive on time, not even trying to salvage whatever cargo might still be on the ship.
- Background Halo: Kamen's hallucination of Fiona in the finale. She's sitting before a broken section of the hull with a circular window, with the planet Vesta floating into view.
- Big Bad Ensemble: The Hollow, the psychic predator that enslaves Kamen and starts hunting the other survivors, starts as the singular antagonist. In the last few episodes, Kris becomes as much of a threat with her sociopathic plan to loot the wreck of the Demeter and leave everyone else to die.
- Big Damn Heroes: Levi coming in at the last minute to blow away the Hollow right as its about to take control of a helpless Azi, and subsequently destroying its adult form and freeing Kamen when it tries to do the same thing to her.
- Bittersweet Ending: Kris takes off in the only escape shuttle, stranding everyone else on Vesta, but the Hollow has been defeated and many of the remaining crew members were able to be rescued from cryosleep. A Time Skip shows that the survivors have started to build a thriving society in the ship's wreckage with the help of the resurrected Levi, while Kris experiences Laser-Guided Karma as Alien Kudzu overwhelms the shuttle. However, Sam, Terence, and countless other survivors are dead, and there's no indication of any rescue coming to Vesta any time soon.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: There are massive sea creatures that keep their eggs hidden inside some special tube during storms, bird-like creatures who use panels on their heads to fry their prey, psychic creatures that hypnotize thralls to get food, plants that create copies of their prey to propogate themselves, and much more, which is not surprising for a completely alien planet.
- Body Horror: On top of regular Gorn, there is quite a lot of this. The first episode alone shows a bizarre fungus-like organism that can evidently imitate the biology of whatever it kills, leading to a scene where Ursula almost gets devoured by a giant human face blooming out of the floor.
- Boyish Short Hair: Azi has her hair in a buzzcut and is far more tomboyish than Ursula. Kris also has her hair cut short and is tough and no-nonsense.
- Butch Lesbian: Azi was in a relationship with Mia prior to the crash and is a tough, stoic woman.
- Can't Live Without You: The parasite that Sam is infected with latches onto his heart, and Ursula determines that trying to pull it off would likely kill him. Though Ursula holds out hope that the Demeter's medical facilities can remove it safely, Sam ultimately chooses to pull it off himself before it can completely take over his mind, causing him to bleed to death.
- Combat Tentacles: A number of Vestan animals have these, most notably the adult parasites, the flytrap-esque creature that kills Terence, and an amphibious monkey-esque creature that uses a single long tentacle to hold Ursula in place while it climbs up to attack her.
- Crucified Hero Shot: The Hollow holds Azi in this pose with its telekinesis as it prepares to assimilate her.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: A given, considering this show takes place on a Death World, but Terrence's death deserves special mention. He's mangled by an alien plant in a manner resembling an industrial machinery accident, and has to be Mercy Killed by Kris.
- Death World: Between the hostile flora and fauna and its unpredictable environment, it's no surprise the survivors have such a hard time surviving on Vesta.
- Disney Death: The alien substance in Levi causes the wildlife of Vesta to reassemble her after the Hollow tears her apart, and she returns as a golem-esque fusion of machine and nature that saves the day in the final episode.
- Fantastic Fauna Counterpart: While some animals on Vesta are utterly alien, others resemble Earth creatures, like ungulates, bears, crustaceans and rodents.
- Flower Motifs: A white flower can be seen throughout the show, often blooming where something's died. Midway through the season there's a scene that shows a compilation of them, backtracking through the whole journey to that point. Late in the season it's revealed to be the source of the yellow mold that kick-started Levi's sentience. Barry finds one on the Demeter and puts in in the shuttle with the cargo, causing Alien Kudzu to render it inoperable after Kris uses the shuttle to escape Vesta on her own.
- From Nobody to Nightmare:
- Kamen's efforts to feed the Hollow go from collecting fruit to killing other local animals. It goes from herbivore to carnivore and giving it an ample food source allows the Hollow to grow to massive size, and decide all other humans are dangerous and goes about killing them.
- Levi starts the series as a nonsentient Robot Buddy designed for mundane tasks. Contact with the white flower mould grants them sentience and some degree of symbiosis with Vesta's ecology. By the end of the series Levi has begun procreating, making wholly biological children in their image. But it's this trope for Kris, who never even meets Levi but is left derelict and dehydrated by contamination with Levi's mould and ill-will over how she treated Azi.
- Gainax Ending: Combined with a Sequel Hook. After the Time Skip in episode 12, the escape shuttle is shown getting picked up by a mysterious ship crewed by masked cultists, who discover that the shuttle has somehow been almost totally consumed by Alien Kudzu. The cultists find Kris barely alive in the hold, and then turn around to discover one of the miniature organic Levis from Vesta greeting them. Exactly what any of this means is wildly up for interpretation unless we get a second season.
- Gender-Equal Ensemble: The four main survivors are Ursula and Azi, and Sam and Kamen.
- Giant Enemy Crab: The giant crustaceans encountered by Sam and Ursula. They enter the bellies of large sea behemoths to eat their eggs, and one nearly kills Sam before Ursula slays it.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: Kamen clearly loses his sanity far more rapidly than the others due to being completely alone, with only some bizarre psychic creature for company.
- Healing Factor: The telepathic creatures evidently have it. During Azi's brief fight with the one that absorbed Kamen, she manages to cut a massive gash into its side with her glaive, only for it to reseal the wound after a few seconds.
- Hero Killer: The Hollow telekinetically destroys Levi and nearly kills Azi in the seventh episode.
- Hive Mind: Downplayed but present. Levi seemed to be in contact with it through the yellow mold in his processor, and it acts to rebuild him using several separate species. Anything and anyone who dies on Vesta gets a pale white-blue flower, and miniature Levi's grow in pods at the roots, while light flows from the flower. Then there's the psychic "attack" in the climax where Levi shows the Hollow the totality of Vesta's evolution and regresses it to an infant.
- Hostile Weather: The survivors are threatened by a powerful storm that has hurricane-level winds, destructive lightning, and rains of some sort of expanding crystalline substance.
- It's All About Me: A lot of Kamen's troubles, both in his personal life and aboard the Demeter, stem from this. Romantically, his fiance Fiona previously broke up with him due to him never having time for her, and he convinces her to take a job on the Demeter as a way to advance her career and fix their relationship. Things repeat and break down in the ship, with her moving out of their shared quarters. Once the cargo he's in charge shows signs it will degrade before reaching their destination, he asks Sam for help by changing the ships course. When Sam brusquely refuses, Kamen secretly changes the course and dooms everyone.
- It's Personal: Azi develops a personal hatred for the Hollow after it destroys Levi. Although she also recognizes it's too dangerous to take head on.
- Kill and Replace: The pod plants use their tentacles to take the blood sample of passing animals, while also injecting them with a paralytic. The blood sample is used to create a facsimile of the targeted animal, which buries its paralyzed double and infiltrates the herd. It then explodes among them, its acidic flesh killing the entire herd and using them to spawn a new batch of pods.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Kris takes off in the shuttle all by herself, but the mold flower that Barry put in with the cargo takes over the ship, leaving her to aimlessly drift through space. She's eventually found barely alive, having completely run out of water.
- The Lost Lenore: All of Kamen's flashbacks and hallucinations focus on his relationship with his wife, Fiona, who is not among the survivors.
- Laughing Mad: Kamen's first scene shows him breaking down and laughing after being alone for over two weeks.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Kamen and the Hollow communicate via visions where it uses memories of Kamen and Fiona. Towards thee end of the series, the Hollow finds Fiona's corpse and sleeps next to it. After that point the Hallucination of Fiona is entirely new, not a memory, and confronts Kamen with his moral failings, prompting him to finally want to leave the inside of the creature.
- Mercy Kill: Kris is forced to do this to Terrence after he gets fatally mangled by an alien plant.
- Nature Is Not Nice: Despite how absurdly dangerous the wildlife on Vesta is, everything that threatens the survivors are just creatures trying to survive. Only the Hollow eventually shows any indication of intelligent malice, and it's unclear how much of that is due to its relationship with Kamen.
- Neck Snap: The Hollow that Kamen befriends snaps Charlie's neck using its Telekinesis, and nearly does the same to Barry much later.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Kamen is directly responsible for just about every misfortune faced by the crew of the Demeter.
- Before the start of the series, he changed the ship's course against Sam's specific orders in order to keep cargo he was responsible for from spoiling before they reached their destination. Sam refused the change because of solar storms...which is what wrecked the ship.
- Kamen facilitates an ordinary telepath's From Nobody to Nightmare transformation into the Hollow. The Hollow goes on to directly kill one crewman with telekinesis, tear Levi into pieces, and destroy the equipment used to defrost the surviving crew, leading to their deaths.
- Non-Malicious Monster: Most of the terrifying fauna that crawls Vesta isn't knowingly hostile, just creatures trying to survive and reacting to the strange humanoid visitors. Eventually subverted with Hollow, who becomes more intelligent and vicious after bonding with Kamen.
- Oop North: Azi has a pronounced northern English accent.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The parasite that infests Sam starts to influence his actions and make him build an environment for the alien that spawned it to be born. Realizing he has it helps him keep some of his mind.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: Being exposed to an alien substance causes Levi to develop a more human-like mindset and mannerisms, even developing a tune completely on her own.
- Robinsonade: The series begins with the crew of a freighter being stranded on an unknown alien world and forced to survive using their wits and whatever they can find on the planet.
- Robot Buddy: Levi is a robot from the cargo transport who Azi brings along with her, and who becomes her close companion.
- Scenery Porn: The Vesta planet might be dangerous, but damn if it isn't beautiful to look at.
- Serious Business: The three miners play a game to determine who will be in charge on field missions, which involves linking arms and hyperventilating until one one remains standing.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The opening title sequence, which lays a gentle, sentimental piano solo over terrifying images of the destruction of Demeter and the deaths of much of the crew.
- Story Breadcrumbs: Each episode provides tiny bits of backstory as to how the survivors wound up on the planet. A coolant leak on the ship made it impossible to reach their original destination with their cargo intact, and Kamen diverted the ship's course to correct for it, passing by an unstable sun in the process. The ship was hit by a solar flare as it passed over Vesta, resulting in the crash.
- Super-Persistent Predator: The Hollow, after assimilating Kamen, starts relentlessly pursuing the survivors to the Demeter despite being well outside its normal habitat.
- Surprisingly Sudden Death: Terence gets mangled by some kind of tentacled creature that lays in wait for prey and then traps them in its tendrils as soon as something moves by.
- The Symbiote: Just about everything on the planet; predator, prey, and plant alike, either practices some kind of Mutualism with another species or commits Parasitism in order to survive.
- Tag Along Kid: Barry from the second group of survivors is a teenager with autism who has trouble appreciating how dangerous the planet really is.
- Telekinesis: The Hollow's species all have telekinetic abilities in addition to their mind-control abilities, making them one of the most dangerous species on Vesta.
- Upsetting the Balance:
- Kamen directly upsets the balance of the ecosystem on Vesta when the Hollow manages to brainwash him, allowing it to gain access to prey it could never have killed on its own and grow to massive size. This culminates in the finale, when the Hollow attacks the resurrected Levi, and tries to use its black goop to psychically connect with Levi and overpower her. This backfires as Levi and the yellow mold give the Hollow a mind blast full of the Genetic Memory of their planet, reducing it back to the size of an infant.
- More broadly, the human survivors are shown to give an edge to the native life that they wouldn't have otherwise. The parasite, for example, lucks out when it infests a survivor that can build more complex habitats and strategically infect other lifeforms.
- We Are as Mayflies: Inverted. There is an alien plant that produces a tiny humanoid creature with which to pollinate itself. This creature lives just long enough to accomplish its task and then wastes away, dying of old age mere minutes after its birth.
- We Can Rebuild Him: Levi is torn to pieces by the Hollow, but the native life gathers the pieces and reassembles her as best they can, resulting in a plant/robot hybrid.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Charlie is one of the survivors that gets awakened from cryosleep on the Demeter and narrowly escapes an attack from some dinosaur-esque creatures. It looks like he's gonna be another protagonist for a little bit, but then he encounters Kamen and gets his head twisted around 180 degrees by his telepathic master.
